Nica Siegel
Nica Siegel is a political theorist with research interests at the intersections of continental thought, critical theory, psychoanalysis, theories and histories of political action, Black Radicalism, anticolonialism, law, and political economy. She is Visiting Assistant Professor in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College, having received her PhD in Political Science at Yale University in December 2021 before taking up a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Political Theory at the Justitia Center for Advanced Study at Goethe University, Frankfurt.
Her first book, Politics and Exhaustion: The Phenomenology of Action and the Horizons of Critique, focuses on the contributions of a set of thinkers and actors, including Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, and Frank B. Wilderson III., who saw in the claim to and contestation over exhaustion paradoxical conceptual resources for social transformation. In this, the project also engages with feminist, environmental, and Black Radical thought as well as materials from social movements and the history of decolonial psychiatry. One example of this work, titled “Fanon’s Clinic: Revolutionary Therapeutics and the Politics of Exhaustion",” has been published in POLITY. A popular account of this research has appeared in Parapraxis magazine and been featured on the podcast "Ordinary Unhappiness." Nica is also co-editor of Another Universalism, a 2023 edited volume from Columbia University's New Directions in Critical Theory Series.
Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in POLITY; The Columbia New Directions in Critical Theory book series, the South African Journal on Human Rights; Theoria: a Journal of Social and Political Theory; PhiloSOPHIA: a Journal of Transcontinental Feminism; PARAPRAXIS; Law & Social Inquiry; and an edited volume in NYU Press’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute Series on Race and Justice. To her research, she also brings expertise in legal theory and history of political economy, with a particular focus on South African jurisprudence. Prior to Ph.D, she served as an intern and researcher in Land Reform, Customary Law, and Socioeconomic Rights at the Legal Resources Centre, a constitutional impact litigation NGO in Cape Town, South Africa. Nica regularly presents work at interdisciplinary and political science conferences and has been invited to present research in series including the Brown University Political Theory Colloquium, the Wesleyan University Center for the Humanities, the Colloquium of Normative Orders at the Goethe University, in the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam, and in UC Berkeley's Department of Rhetoric. Contact at [email protected].
Supervisors: Seyla Benhabib, Karuna Mantena, and Paul North
Her first book, Politics and Exhaustion: The Phenomenology of Action and the Horizons of Critique, focuses on the contributions of a set of thinkers and actors, including Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, and Frank B. Wilderson III., who saw in the claim to and contestation over exhaustion paradoxical conceptual resources for social transformation. In this, the project also engages with feminist, environmental, and Black Radical thought as well as materials from social movements and the history of decolonial psychiatry. One example of this work, titled “Fanon’s Clinic: Revolutionary Therapeutics and the Politics of Exhaustion",” has been published in POLITY. A popular account of this research has appeared in Parapraxis magazine and been featured on the podcast "Ordinary Unhappiness." Nica is also co-editor of Another Universalism, a 2023 edited volume from Columbia University's New Directions in Critical Theory Series.
Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in POLITY; The Columbia New Directions in Critical Theory book series, the South African Journal on Human Rights; Theoria: a Journal of Social and Political Theory; PhiloSOPHIA: a Journal of Transcontinental Feminism; PARAPRAXIS; Law & Social Inquiry; and an edited volume in NYU Press’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute Series on Race and Justice. To her research, she also brings expertise in legal theory and history of political economy, with a particular focus on South African jurisprudence. Prior to Ph.D, she served as an intern and researcher in Land Reform, Customary Law, and Socioeconomic Rights at the Legal Resources Centre, a constitutional impact litigation NGO in Cape Town, South Africa. Nica regularly presents work at interdisciplinary and political science conferences and has been invited to present research in series including the Brown University Political Theory Colloquium, the Wesleyan University Center for the Humanities, the Colloquium of Normative Orders at the Goethe University, in the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam, and in UC Berkeley's Department of Rhetoric. Contact at [email protected].
Supervisors: Seyla Benhabib, Karuna Mantena, and Paul North
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Papers by Nica Siegel
Siegel, N. (2023). Fanon, Frantz. In: Sellers, M., Kirste, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6730-0_1030-1
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-94-007-6730-0_1030-1
For as long as there have been motion pictures, scenes of execution have appeared in American film. This article examines those scenes over the course of the twentieth century and suggests that spectatorship, and what it means to watch, is central to scenes of execution in film. We are interested less in the intentions and politics of a filmmaker and more in what those scenes offer viewers, a question we engage through a Lacanian understanding of the gaze. We argue that three central motifs of spectatorship characterized death penalty films during the more than 100-year period that we studied. First, viewers are often positioned as members of an audience and many scenes of execution are presented in a highly theatrical fashion and, as a result, the line between spectatorship and witnessing is blurred. Second, in many scenes of execution viewers are brought “backstage” and provided chilling, intimate views of the machinery of death, privileged views unavailable outside of film. The third motif shifts the positioning of the viewer such that we stand in the shoes of those who are to be executed. We conclude by asking whether and how scenes of execution in American film provoke in viewers an awareness of the political responsibility inherent in their identities as democratic citizens in a killing state.
This article will investigate this tension and Arendt’s response to its emergence. Beginning with an account of radicality in relation to Arendt’s work on crisis in The Human Condition (1958) and Between Past and Future (1961), among other texts, this article will draw out an account of what it means to 'think politically' in a radical sense on Arendt's terms, first by considering the spatial logics that allow us to describe the location of the thinker who hopes to think responsively, to avoid both thoughtlessness and withdrawal in times of crisis. The article will then turn towards the particular interruption of Eichmann and ‘the banality of evil' into this project, and it will consider the stakes of this interruption. The manifest crisis of evil was accompanied for Arendt, as this article will go on to argue, by a correlative and immanent crisis of unthinkability, of “shallowness” and “rootlessness,” that threw into question in a precise way the ability of thinking to respond to the present on the terms of Arendt’s earlier work.
From this perspective, the article will end by articulating a trajectory towards The Life of the Mind, Arendt’s unfinished attempt, demanded by the particular crisis of Eichmann, to think unradicality radically. It will conclude by reflecting on the form of the unfinished work - that The Life of the Mind itself is - as a way of understanding Arendt's final teaching about judgment and the possibility of a truly 'political thought.'
This article is adapted from my Amherst College senior honors thesis in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, titled "A Form of Thinking Called Arendt" (2014).
Drafts by Nica Siegel
Book Reviews by Nica Siegel
Siegel, N. (2023). Fanon, Frantz. In: Sellers, M., Kirste, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6730-0_1030-1
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-94-007-6730-0_1030-1
For as long as there have been motion pictures, scenes of execution have appeared in American film. This article examines those scenes over the course of the twentieth century and suggests that spectatorship, and what it means to watch, is central to scenes of execution in film. We are interested less in the intentions and politics of a filmmaker and more in what those scenes offer viewers, a question we engage through a Lacanian understanding of the gaze. We argue that three central motifs of spectatorship characterized death penalty films during the more than 100-year period that we studied. First, viewers are often positioned as members of an audience and many scenes of execution are presented in a highly theatrical fashion and, as a result, the line between spectatorship and witnessing is blurred. Second, in many scenes of execution viewers are brought “backstage” and provided chilling, intimate views of the machinery of death, privileged views unavailable outside of film. The third motif shifts the positioning of the viewer such that we stand in the shoes of those who are to be executed. We conclude by asking whether and how scenes of execution in American film provoke in viewers an awareness of the political responsibility inherent in their identities as democratic citizens in a killing state.
This article will investigate this tension and Arendt’s response to its emergence. Beginning with an account of radicality in relation to Arendt’s work on crisis in The Human Condition (1958) and Between Past and Future (1961), among other texts, this article will draw out an account of what it means to 'think politically' in a radical sense on Arendt's terms, first by considering the spatial logics that allow us to describe the location of the thinker who hopes to think responsively, to avoid both thoughtlessness and withdrawal in times of crisis. The article will then turn towards the particular interruption of Eichmann and ‘the banality of evil' into this project, and it will consider the stakes of this interruption. The manifest crisis of evil was accompanied for Arendt, as this article will go on to argue, by a correlative and immanent crisis of unthinkability, of “shallowness” and “rootlessness,” that threw into question in a precise way the ability of thinking to respond to the present on the terms of Arendt’s earlier work.
From this perspective, the article will end by articulating a trajectory towards The Life of the Mind, Arendt’s unfinished attempt, demanded by the particular crisis of Eichmann, to think unradicality radically. It will conclude by reflecting on the form of the unfinished work - that The Life of the Mind itself is - as a way of understanding Arendt's final teaching about judgment and the possibility of a truly 'political thought.'
This article is adapted from my Amherst College senior honors thesis in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, titled "A Form of Thinking Called Arendt" (2014).